Japanese diaspora: Map

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The
Japanese diaspora, and its individual members
known as , are Japanese emigrants
from Japan and their
descendants to other parts of the
world.Emigration from Japan first happened and was
recorded as early as the 12th century to the Philippines, but did not become a mass phenomenon until the
Meiji Era, when Japanese began to go to
North America, beginning in 1897 with
35 emigrants to Mexico; and later Latin
America, beginning in 1899 with 790 emigrants to
Peru./www.universia.edu.pe/noticias/principales/destacada.php?id=65889"
target="_blank"> "Desafíos que nos acercan," El
Comercio (Lima, Peru). March 12, 2008. There was also
significant emigration to the territories of the Empire of Japan during the colonial period; however, most such
emigrants repatriated to Japan after the end of World War II in
Asia.

According to the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, there
are about 2.5 million nikkei living in their adopted countries.
The
largest of these foreign communities are in Brazil, the
United
States and the Philippines. Descendants of emigrants from the Meiji Era
still hold recognizable communities in those countries, forming
separate ethnic groups from Japanese peoples in Japan.

Terminology

Nikkei is derived from the term in Japanese, used to refer to
Japanese people who emigrated from Japan and their descendants.
Emigration refers to permanent settlers,
excluding transient Japanese abroad. These groups were historically
differentiated by the terms issei
(first-generation nikkeijin), nisei (second-generation nikkeijin),
sansei (third-generation
nikkeijin), and yonsei
(fourth-generation nikkeijin). The term Nikkeijin may or
may not apply to those Japanese who still hold Japanese
nationality. An inclusive definition would see Japanese emigrants
who have significantly acculturated to their new surroundings as
"Nikkeijin," while an exclusive definition would only include their
children, born and raised outside of Japan (who may or may not be
dual citizens). Usages of the term may depend on perspective. For
example, the Japanese government defines them according to
(foreign) citizenship and the ability to provide proof of Japanese
lineage up to the third generation - legally the fourth generation
has no legal standing in Japan that is any different from another
"foreigner." On the other hand, in the U.S. or other places where
Nikkeijin have developed their own communities and identities,
Japanese emigrants tend to be included; citizenship is less
relevant and a commitment to the local community becomes more
important.

Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National
Museum, defined nikkei as follows:The definition was derived
from The International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year
collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10
countries and 14 participating institutions.

Despite claims to the contrary, the Japanese are not exceptional in
all respects; therefore, it can be anticipated that new cultural
identies will occur within the Japanese diaspora.

Early history

In the 1640s, the Tokugawa
shogunate imposed maritime restrictions
which forbade Japanese from leaving the country, and from returning
if they were already abroad. This policy would not be lifted for
over two hundred years. Travel restrictions were eased once Japan
opened diplomatic relations
with western nations. In 1867, the bakufu
began issuing travel documents for overseas travel and
emigration.

Before 1885, relatively few people emigrated from Japan, in part
because the Meiji government was reluctant to allow emigration,
both because it lacked the political power to adequately protect
Japanese emigrants, and because it believed that the presence of
Japanese as unskilled laborers in foreign countries would hamper
its ability to revise the unequal
treaties. A notable exception to this trend was a group of 153
contract laborers who immigrated--without official passports--to
Hawai'i in 1868. . A portion of this group stayed on after the
expiration of the initial labor contract, forming the nucleus of
the nikkei community in Hawai'i. In 1885, the Meiji government
began to turn to officially sponsored emigration programs to
alleviate pressure from overpopulation and the effects of the
Matsukata deflation in rural
areas. For the next decade, the government was closely involved in
the selection and pre-departure instruction of emigrants. The
Japanese government was keen on keeping Japanese emigrants
well-mannered while abroad in order to show the West that Japan was
a dignified society, worthy of respect. By the mid-1890s,
immigration companies (imin-kaisha 移民会社), not sponsored by the
government, began to dominate the process of recruiting emigrants,
but government-sanctioned ideology continued to influence
emigration patterns.

Americas

People
from Japan began
migrating to the U.S. and Canada in significant numbers following
the political, cultural, and social changes stemming from the 1868
Meiji Restoration. (See
Japanese American and Japanese Canadian). Particularly after the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
Japanese immigrants were sought by industrialists to replace the
Chinese immigrants. In 1907, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" between
the governments of Japan and the U.S. ended immigration of Japanese
workers (i.e., men), but permitted the immigration of spouses of
Japanese immigrants already in the U.S. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the
immigration of all but a token few Japanese, until the Immigration Act of 1965, there was
very little further Japanese immigration. That which occurred was
mostly in the form of war brides.
The
majority of Japanese settled in Hawaii where today
a third of the state's population are of Japanese descent, and the
rest in the west coast (California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and
Washington state), but other significant communities are found in
the Northeast and Midwest states.

The Japanese diaspora has been unique in the absence of new
emigration flows in the second half of the 20th century.

With the restrictions on entering the United States, the level of
Japanese immigration to Latin America began to increase.
Japanese immigrants
(particularly from the Okinawa Prefecture) arrived in small numbers during the early 20th
century.Japanese
Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside
Japan (numbering about 1.5 million, [27637] compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese
outside Japan.The first Japanese immigrants (791 people,
mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on
the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of
better living conditions. Many of them ended up as laborers
on coffee farms.

The first Japanese ArgentineNisei (second generation), Seicho Arakaki, was born in 1911. Today there
are an estimated 32,000 people of Japanese descent in Argentina
according to Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad.

Europe

The Japanese in Britain form the
largest Japanese community in Europe with well over 100,000 living
all over the United Kingdom (the majority being in London) . In
recent years, many young Japanese have been migrating from Japan to
Britain to engage in cultural production and to become successful
artists in London. There are also small numbers of Japanese people in Russia some
whose heritage date back to the times when both countries shared
the territories of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; some Japanese
communists settled in the Soviet Union, including Mutsuo
Hakamada, the brother of former Japanese Communist Party chairman
Satomi Hakamada. The 2002 Russian census showed 835 people
claiming Japanese ethnicity (nationality).

There is
a sizable Japanese community in Dusseldorf, Germany to hold nearly 8,000 of Japanese
descent.

Asia (except Japan)

The first
Japanese emigration to the rest of Asia was noted as early as the
12th century to the Philippines; early Japanese settlements included
those in Lingayen
Gulf, Manila, the coasts
of Ilocos and in the Visayas when the Philippines was under the Majapahit and the Srivijaya Empire. A larger wave came in the
1600s, when Red seal ships traded in
Southeast Asia, and Japanese Catholics fled from the religious
persecution imposed by the shoguns, and settled in the Philippines,
among other destinations. Many of them also intermarried with the
local Filipina women (including those of pure or mixedSpanish and
Chinese descent), thus forming the
new Japanese-Mestizo community. During the American
colonial era, the number of Japanese laborers working in
plantations rose so high that in the 1900s, Davao soon became
dubbed as a Ko Nippon Koku ("Little Japan" in Japanese)
with a Japanese school, a Shinto shrine and a diplomatic mission
from Japan. There is even a popular restaurant called "The
Japanese Tunnel", which includes an actual tunnel made by the
Japanese in time of the war.

There was
also a significant level of emigration to the overseas territories
of the Empire of
Japan during the Japanese colonial period, including
Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Karafuto. Unlike emigrants to the Americas,
Japanese going to the colonies occupied a higher rather than lower
social niche upon their arrival.

In 1938
there were 309,000 Japanese in Taiwan.By the
end of World War II, there were over
850,000 Japanese in Korea and more
than 2 million in China, most of
whom were farmers in Manchukuo (the
Japanese had a plan to bring in 5 million Japanese settlers
intoManchukuo).

In the census of December 1939, the total population of the
South Pacific Mandate was
129,104, of which 77,257 were Japanese. By December 1941,
Saipan had a
population of more than 30,000 people, including 25,000
Japanese.There were over 400,000 people living on
Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) when the Soviet offensive began in early August
1945. Most were of Japanese or Korean extraction. When Japan lost the
Kuril
Islands, 17,000 Japanese were expelled, most from
thesouthern islands.

Return migration to Japan

In the 1980s, with Japan's growing economy facing a shortage of
workers willing to do so-called three 'K' jobs
(kitsui [difficult], kitanai [dirty], and
kiken [dangerous]), Japan's Ministry of Labor began to
grant visas to ethnic Japanese to come to Japan and work in
factories. The vast majority — estimated at roughly 300,000 — are
Brazilians, but there is also a large population of Peruvians and
smaller populations of Argentines and other Latin Americans. As
native speakers of Portuguese and Spanish, some also speak Japanese
and/or English, but many do not.

It is now disputed that those Nikkeijin born in Japan from two
full-blooded Nikkeijin parents should be given Japanese
nationality. This would mean that lex soli
would apply to children of Nikkeijin parents. This seems to be a
rare occurrence in the past, but with the Nikkei Brazilians this
instance is not too uncommon. Being born in Japan, and being both
ethnically and culturally Japanese, many Japanese argue that these
children should be granted Japanese nationality by birth.

Since the Japanese economy is still in recession as of 2009,
the government has offered 300000 yen for unemployed migrants to
return to their country of origin to alleviate the country's
soaring unemployment. Another 200000 yen is offered for each
additional family member to leave.

See also

Notes

For more on the history of travel documents and passports in
modern Japan, see "外交史料 Q&A その他" (Diplomatic Historical
Materials Q&A, misc.). 外務省 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
[1].

Known as the Gannen-mono (元年者), or "first year people" because
they left Japan in the first year of the Meiji Era. Jonathan
Dresner, "Instructions to Emigrant Laborers, 1885-1894: "Return in
Triumph" or 'Wander on the Verge of Starvation,"" In Japanese
Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain
Futures, ed. Nobuko Adachi (London: Routledge, 2006), 53.